How Trump circumventing Congress is different from previous presidents

The Guardian  -  Nothing speaks more eloquently of the disempowering of the US Congress under Donald Trump’s second presidency than the brazenly audacious arrest of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia.

Far from recognizing it, Trump did not even acknowledge Congress’s right to know – keeping senior members in the dark until the operation to seize the strongman was under way.

Only after the operation to detain Maduro had begun did the administration bother to tell members of the congressional “gang of eight”: the top Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives, plus the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees of the two chambers.

That marks a conspicuous break with convention, even as previously observed by Trump himself. When Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force was killed in a targeted strike during Trump’s first presidency in January 2020, the gang was punctiliously consulted, people involved in that operation have said.

In one fell swoop, the capture appeared to render the 1973 War Powers Resolution obsolete, if not an outright work of fiction.

The 1973 act – passed in the wake of the Vietnam war amid widespread anxieties about an incipient “imperial presidency” – requires a president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops into hostilities and withdraw them after 60 days, unless Congress authorizes the action or declares war.